I have heard of sex being used as a crisis coping mechanism and I've seen plenty of movies where the bawling / distraught / frightened or grieving character falls into the arms of the closest breathing human and makes mad passionate love and afterwards peace is restored in their life
Personally I couldn't think of anything I would least feel like doing when I am mid crisis, but hey each to their own.
We all have our ways of coping and it seems that during the recent stress of my dad being unwell I have discovered that I indeed have my own coping mechanism... one I inherited from my mum.
We clean.
For reals.
The other night I rang my mum to check on how she was doing and the conversation went kind of like this;
"Hi Mum, I just wanted to check in and see how you are" I enquired gently as I reached for the bottle of dish washing liquid.
"I'm doing OK thanks love" came the slightly breathless but reassuring response from my mum.
"Have you eaten? What are you doing?" I asked as I furiously scrubbed at a dirty smudge on one of the kitchen cupboards before filling a bucket of disinfectant to scrub down the rest of the cupboards.
"Oh I'm just cleaning the blinds" answered my Mum in a muffled voice.
"Seriously Mum? You should be resting. Who cleans at a time like this?" I demanded as I tried to ram the stupid power motor head onto the Dyson hose thingy.
Ummm it seems we do.
Yep clearly I take after my Mum and we have figured out our own way of dealing with a crisis - we clean! And quite manically at that!
I'm not so sure how this cleaning thing is working out for me though.
After lying on my bed staring out the window for a while the other afternoon, I began to notice how dusty our billowy white curtains were. Overcome by an urgent need to clean them, I screamed out to the hubby who was downstairs "HONEYYY INeedYourHelpCauseIHaveToWashTheCurtainsLikeRIGHTNOW! PLEEEEEEEASE!"
Or something like that.
After a bit of bleach and a good hot soapy wash, I was expecting to have clean dust free billowy white curtains to stare at whilst lying on the bed being all melancholy.
What I got instead was very clean white shredded to shit billowy curtains.
Maybe there is a damn good reason after all that people choose sex in a crisis and not cleaning. Their life might be falling to pieces but at least their curtains would be intact.
How do you cope in a crisis?
Would you choose clean curtains over passionate sex?
Do you have any weird and wonderful coping techniques?
